John Egbert
For the post-Scratch version of this character, see Poppop. '''John Egbert '''is one of the main characters in Homestuck. He is a boy who, according to , has not been given a name until his thirteenth birthday; however, this is just a framing mechanism. In the past, he has ended letters with "-ghostyTrickster (john)". While originally given the name , the game rejected it and settled for John. John uses an online application known as Pesterchum to communicate with his other tech-savvy friends. His chumhandle is . It used to be , but he changed it to avoid the Trolls. Oddly, he chose the name ectoBiologist based on a comment by one of the trolls. His God tier title may be a pun on his associated classical element, because interchanging the first and last words produces "breath of air". His web browser of choice is Typheus, who coincidentally is the mate of Echidna, the namesake of Jade's web browser. John's associated Classical element is air, and his Associated Item is oil. Sburb John initially did not have a firm grasp on the concepts of Sburb and rarely understood what was going on with some of the more technical commands. Despite his penchant for video games, he lacked any sense of understanding game play rules, nor could he fathom the abstract nature of Captchaloguing. Despite that, his level of understanding the cipher-based technology behind Punched cards is remarkable. As he is one of the players in Sburb, John's peril quickly escalated as the game progressed, and he had limited understanding of what was going on or what he needed to do. However, he later showed some more proficiency at playing by the game's rules, and he has even come up with some ingenious ideas, such as combining two punched cards to create a new weapon with the Alchemiter. He later made a whole bunch of possibly useful stuff based on the same principle. John was given the role of "Heir of Breath," mentioned in Nanna's Note to him at the end of Act 2, since not only is he the "heir" of his father (a role unshared by any of the other kids) but he is also associated with Air/Wind elementally, which logically connects to breath. John's role is later confirmed by Nanna in the opening of Act 4. For a long time, John's preferred weapons were his trusty Pogo Hammer and the Wrinklefucker, which he would occasionally dual-wield. Later on, Davesprite told John the code for Fear No Anvil. Biography BOO HOO! Personality and Traits John's physical appearance could be described as a kid with black messy hair. He has an obvious nerdy look about him, a trait he may have inherited from his bucktoothed grandmother (Who actually turns out to be genetically his mother, while his adoptive father is actually his half-brother). His outfit usually consists of a white shirt (though the shirt modeled after John's you can buy in the store is light blue) with a picture of what appears to be Slimer from Ghostbusters but is in fact a Japanese knock-off, shorts and a belt, and black sneakers. He wears a pair of rectangular glasses. He has briefly worn other items, such as an attempted disguise, and for some time he wore a teal suit with the green slime ghost on it, a tie, and long pants. This was a combination of the suit (a birthday present from his Dad), his normal shirt, and the "Wise Guy" book created during John's . He then began wearing the Junior Ectobiologist's Lab Suit, a light green lab coat over dark green shirt and pants, with yellow shoes and a green slime ghost belt. Vriska Serket later outfitted him in an ensemble reminiscent of her own. After achieving the level of god tier, he wears an all blue ensemble featuring a hoodie with an abnormally long hood. John's interests are movies, web comics, and video games. He enjoys paranormal lore and magic tricks, the latter of which he also performs. He owns a computer and likes to make programs, no matter how bad they may be. He is left handed (when not spriteflipped), allergic to peanuts, and has a long-standing hatred of the brand Betty Crocker. He can also play the piano quite well. His room has various items to support his hobbies, such as a Magic Chest filled with trick objects. His walls are littered with posters of movies, web comics, and video games. Notably, his collection of items when colored are typically green, but John associates himself with the color blue. John initially starts with the Stack Fetch Modus for his Sylladex and has little knowledge of other Modi available. After retrieving a free Queue Modus from his Data Structures textbook, he found he was unable to switch back to the Stack Modus until he found the physical modus card underneath his magic chest. Later, he found an Array modus card in a present from Dad, and then combined all three and made an Array of Queuestacks with the Modus Control Deck. You might call them John's Queuestacks. His first Strife Specibus was specified with the Hammerkind Abstratus, meaning he was able to wield only hammers during Strife for the rest of the game. After breaking his sledgehammer during a fight with a Shale Imp, John grabbed the handle and used it during his attack. This caused the Abstratus to temporarily reset to handlekind, which had a side-effect of removing the head of his claw hammer and leaving the handle. Repairing the sledgehammer caused the Abstratus to return to hammerkind, at which point the claw hammer handle was ejected from the Specibus. John also gained a second Strife Specibus of bunnykind, used by the Shale Imp and dropped after its defeat, which he placed along with his hammerkind Specibus into his Strife Portfolio. John tends to be a bit of a goofball, making bad jokes and using off-beat humour and subtle irony. John has a typical nerd nature in that he is very passive, and he follows commands more easily than the others, complying with commands not because of their logical sense but because the command told him to. He is more prone to stupid ideas than his friends and is made out to be the butt of a lot of jokes when he chats with them through Pesterchum. John's inner nature drifts toward an overall good guy, more out of necessity to avoid his father than moral obligations. He even celebrates the birthdays of his friends, Rose, Dave, and Jade. (Naturally, he sent them gifts: some knitting needles, Ben Stiller's sunglasses, and pumpkin seeds, respectively.) John has a tendency to be given commands about making noises and shitting on things. Fortunately, he hasn't complied with any of these, though he often seems to consider them. While not the most intelligent or imaginative of the main characters, John is by far the most inventive; from the beginning, he shows more innovative prowess in combining items than any of the others, even before the introduction of the alchemiter; he demonstrates this with his poster-nailing and harlequin-funniness-amplifying abilities. Relationships Rose, Dave, and Jade are his best friends, and have been for quite some time. None of their feelings for each other has changed since the session has started, although he does think Rose has gotten crazier, and has half-jokingly sworn to rescue her from the clutches of evil caused by her commune with the deep ones. He appears to be nervous about Karkat's idea of him marrying Rose; although, John has brought up the shipping grid and marrying Rose on quite a few occasions, despite his supposed hesitance. His relationship with Karkat has sort of become a duo of hate and friendship. John now enjoys all of Karkat's hate filled rants because of the sheer 'insane trolling' Karkat is capable of. While not his patron troll, Karkat has trolled him backwards through almost every step of his journey. After he finished his backwards trolling, Karkat's feelings toward John became far less antagonistic, and he has even apologized for all his bad behavior to him and his friends. His talks with Terezi have been strained at best. The first time they talked, Terezi threatened to kill him as a prank. Later on, he gets involved in Terezi's plot to mess up the timeline, although they constantly antagonized each other. Since Dave has started working together with Terezi, she has stopped talking to John for the most part, as Vriska became his new patron troll. Since it has been a while since they talked, it is unclear whether they are on good terms or bad terms. John has talked to Kanaya twice: first (from his perspective) months in the past, and second during Sburb through Rose's account. John said she was "kinda cool" after their first conversation. John's relationship with Vriska is a very complex one. At first, Vriska decided to help John on his quest as a means of competing with Terezi, who was helping Dave. Vriska was very bossy and a control freak towards John at first, which he found kind of annoying, but he still enjoyed talking with her. Vriska and John's feelings developed deeper: John used more of her typing quirk to please her, Vriska made an outfit for John that she said makes him totally hot, and John showed her Nicolas Cage, who became her fangirl crush. However, after Vriska killed Tavros, Vriska opened up more of her feelings than she had with anybody else. She held John's opinion of her in highest respect, fearing that he would be angry with her. She has told him about not only her remorse for killing, but how her views of killing compared to those of troll society, how much she admired humans for being weaker but nicer, and her entire background. Though he was a bit freaked out after hearing that Vriska had murdered twice and killed thousands to feed her Lusus, he did not think any less of her after receiving the shock. John cares about Vriska's wellbeing, no matter what kind of person she had been, and Vriska also reciprocated those feelings, hoping that John would get strong enough to stop Jack and protect their friends in case she died trying to fight him. Before her death, Vriska asked John out on a date, confirming that Vriska's feelings for John were red after all. John accepted, but Vriska was killed by Terezi, leaving a visibly shaken Karkat to look through their last pesterlog and respond through her account. After switching to his own account, he asked John if he genuinely liked Vriska, upon which John confirmed their affection was mutual—prompting Karkat to withhold the information of Vriska's death and the specifics of Gamzee's rampage for now to avoid distracting John from the important tasks at hand. During the ride to the new session, John claims to no longer care about romance, and has now even forgotten everything that he and Vriska talked about. Gallery 03850.gif|John reviving. 03950.gif JohnFarFuture.gif|John as he nears the end of his adventure with his dashing Cosby paraphernalia. 04341.gif 03789_1.gif Cascade-John.png 04302.gif 02736.gif John_Cool.gif|John in Hero Mode. John-Windy Thing.gif|John doing The Windy Thing Homestuck-round-1.png John_Victory.png|John's Victory Pose 05288.gif|god damn dave sprite. 05303.gif|JUST WHO CARES. 05330.gif|John's eye color Trivia * John's God Tier hood heavily resembles a wind sock. * John's ghost slime shirt is a reference to an asian knock off of the ghost slime from Ghostbusters. More info on that here * John may be named for James Dallas Egbert III, a student at Michigan State University who was incorrectly alleged to have disappeared into the school's steam tunnels for reasons related to the role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons (D&D). Though, you'd have to ask Cuttlefish, the user who originally named him on the MSPA forum here. * John's eyes are , matching his Pesterchum text. He was the third kid to have his eye colour shown. * Birthday-wise, his astrological sign is Aries. All of the other Kids other than Jane are Sagittarius. * John has a severe allergy to peanuts, shown . Jake shares this allergy. * John's current screen name, ectoBiologist, has the initials EB. EB may also refer to EarthBound, one of the video games that inspired Andrew Hussie to do Homestuck. This may or may not be a coincidence. * John's address (21605 Fir Dr, Maple Valley, Washington) is a real place. * In one of with Dave, the word "white" was changed to "Íæûë€Å" (part of it was removed; it tripped the spam filter with a particular character), until being changed back. * John's hair was different from until , when he is next seen with his current hair from onwards. * It is interesting that John's title the Heir of Breath is pronounced "Air Of Breath". This is probably a coincidence, but you never know. * and are reference to Ghostbusters, where a cart chases a slimer down a hall when provoked by Stantz, where in the panel shows John (Cart) crashing into the wall when holding onto Jade (Stantz), who was following Jaspers (Slimer). When the slimer hit the wall, it revealed a green slime covering it, similar to the pink slime left by Jaspers. * The name "Zoosmell" may be a reference to one of Andrew Hussie's older blurbs, also named, Zoo Smell. See also *John's House *John's Room *John's Outfits Category:Homestuck Protagonists/Allies